Swedish spooks knocked offline by hack attack
DDoS attack follows intro of new monitoring powers
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The website of the Swedish Signals Intelligence agency (Försvarets Radioanstalt, or FRA) was taken offline by a massive DDoS attack this week.
Fra.se was intermittently inaccessible from Monday night until Thursday morning, when full service was restored. The agency was in the news recently after Swedish legislators passed a law allowing FRA to tap internet communications networks that pass through Sweden.
The monitoring effectively started last month, reports Finnish security firm F-secure, which notes that Russia's international internet traffic passes through Sweden.
It's unclear who's behind the attacks, but Russian cybercrime operations or possibly file sharers lashing out against the Pirate Bay clampdown are among the possible suspects.
In a statement, (translation via Google here) FRA said that the temporary disruption to its web site had no effect on its work.
Downtime stats for the Fra.se site can be found, via Pingdom, here.
An apparently separate denial-of-service attack downed about 40 websites belonging to police and media outlets in Sweden last week. ®
COMMENTS
@ Daemon ZOGG
Really? Plenty in the US didn't at all like their government wiretapping w/o warrants but nothing came of it, 'twas for the sake of anti-terrorist nonsense. Same with increased airport security, cameras in the UK on streets, etc.
You won't ever escape the watchful eyes because paranoia is more powerful than sanity. It will only get worse, and worse, because once freedoms are taken away it takes a revolution to get them back and that's not happening when you can't organize sufficient manpower to get the job done.
The Irrelevance of The FRA and others like them...
While I would certainly shake the hands of those responsible for DDOS attack, It is important to remember that it doesn't matter if you own a "digital" device or not. We live in the digital age. The "freedom" in the digital world is just as important as in the analog world. We must fight for it every single day. There will always be those who would dare to pry into our personal lives. It will always be "us" and "them".
Everytime you pick up a phone, access your bank account, use your debit or credit card, use your vehicle's GPS system for directions.. someone is monitoring those actions. The more people realize this and resent it, the more they will resist the prying eyes of big-brother. The more alternatives the people will turn to.
In some respects, there are some upsides to this. The "TOR" network is already a fine example of this. In the future, and even now, more complex cryptographic schemes are being developed to keep out or at least slow down big-brother entities. The fight over how much control can be applied to human communication has become visible. At least to the Swedish government. The lines in the digital world are being drawn...
;)
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